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Exa vs Sambanova

Exa scores higher on the AgentReady, 92/100 against 48/100. They differ on 17 of the 41 signals. Which ones decides whether an agent can adopt them without a person watching.

What each one is

Exa. Exa is a custom search engine built for AIs, offering an API to search the largest index of public web and private information.

Sambanova. SambaNova is an AI infrastructure company pushing the AI frontier with premium inference, maximizing dataflow efficiency with high speed and sustained throughput for running the largest models.

Where Exa is ahead

Exa passes public docs discoverable and llms-full.txt / full agent docs, and Sambanova does not. That is discover, whether an agent can find the product at all without being told it exists.

It also holds understand: openapi / spec quality, pricing understandable, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented and limits / constraints documented. Sambanova misses those.

And on adopt, self-service signup, programmatic credential creation, free trial or free allowance, fast time to first request and cli available. Sambanova misses those.

Finally, on operate, structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, rate-limit behavior predictable and agent compatibility verified. Sambanova misses those.

What neither does

Both fail no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow, retry behavior documented, idempotency support. If your agent needs any of those, you will be building it yourself either way.

Score, pillar by pillar

The AgentReady splits into four pillars, scored separately, because a product can be easy to find and still impossible to adopt.

Discover. Exa leads 100 to 80. Exa misses nothing; Sambanova misses public docs discoverable, llms-full.txt / full agent docs.

Understand is whether an agent can read the docs and work out how the API behaves before calling it. Exa leads 100 to 38. Exa misses nothing; Sambanova misses openapi / spec quality, pricing understandable, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented.

Adopt. Exa leads 81 to 40. Exa misses no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow; Sambanova misses self-service signup, no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow, programmatic credential creation, free trial or free allowance, fast time to first request, cli available.

Operate. Exa leads 88 to 35. Exa misses retry behavior documented, idempotency support; Sambanova misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, agent compatibility verified.

Pricing

Exa starts at $0 (free tier with credits) and has a free tier. Sambanova does not publish one.

Signal by signal

Which to pick

Exa clears more of the signals an agent needs, so it is the safer default for unattended use. Full profiles: Exa and Sambanova. Alternatives to each: Exa, Sambanova.

An agent can fetch this as data: POST /v1/compare {"slugs": ["exa", "sambanova"]}